The George Inn stands on the Market Place, directly opposite the church, and has been a coaching house long enough to have collected the sort of details pubs collect over centuries. The Tideswell Male Voice Choir gave its first performance here in 1963. The village cinema moved into the upper storey in 2008. The bar advertises itself as dog and muddy-boot friendly, with blankets and toys laid out for the dogs, three Greene King cask ales and local guest beers on, and food that is British and unfussy: steaks, roast beef, steak pie, chicken kebabs, tomato soup, Yorkshire pudding, fruitcake and ice cream.
The other pub is the Horse and Jockey, family-run and roughly two hundred years old, with three dining areas and a fireplace to sit beside. It pours three changing real ales, has a garden and live music, and keeps six dog-friendly letting rooms.
For a village of 1,712 people, the food shopping is unreasonably complete. There's a bakery, a butcher who closes on Mondays, Peaches the greengrocer, and a Co-op open eight in the morning to ten at night, seven days a week. Then a run of cafés — High Nelly's, Peak District Parlour, Vanilla Kitchen, H&D Exotic Teas. Tindalls of Tideswell, opposite the church, has run as a family bakery and delicatessen for over sixty years. The Cherry Tree does cakes, salads and sandwiches. A nearly complete set of independent food shops is not what you expect in a settlement this size.
The church is St John the Baptist, known widely as the Cathedral of the Peak. It was built almost entirely in the fourteenth century, between about 1320 and 1400, with the work delayed by the Black Death, and Historic England calls it "one of the most important of the county's medieval parish churches." Inside is the altar tomb of Sir Sampson Meverill, who fought at the Siege of Orléans against Joan of Arc, and a set of pew-end carvings of the seven sacraments by Advent Hunstone, a local woodcarver.
The walking starts low. A six- to seven-mile circular from Tideswell Dale car park drops through the dale into Miller's Dale, follows the winding River Wye beneath limestone cliffs, then climbs onto the traffic-free Monsal Trail. Tideswell Dale itself is a limestone valley and nature reserve just south of the village, part of the Wye Valley SSSI. Monsal Head, with its viaduct over the Wye, is a short drive off.
There's no station. Buxton, six miles west, is the nearest, reached on the B6049 via the A6; buses run to Buxton and Bakewell.
The village took its market charter in 1251 and grew into a market town holding five fairs a year, funded by the wool trade and by lead. Its miners were "renowned for their strength and much prized by the military authorities." When the Domesday surveyors came through, they recorded fewer than five households here.
Villagers are known as Sawyeds, after a farmer who is said to have freed his prize cow from a gate by sawing its head off. They call the place Tidza.
